Windows Administration

YbotSpawn · #1 19th February 2008, 10:38 PM

Ok, before people scream AHHH WINDOWS... hear me out. I am a System Engineer for a rather large organization. Such organizations have both windows and linux servers. There are a large number of commands I can run on a windows box, to complete tasks that need to be done, but I always have to remote to it, to complete these. Does anyone know of a tool that lets me 'SEND' commands to a windows box and receive the results, with terminal servicing into the thing? An example, but not the rule would be ipconfig or netstat. If I run to run these on 'winserver' how would i do that from like bash, or would it require another program? Thanks!

YbotSpawn · #2 21st February 2008, 05:27 AM

Anyone? bump

bryancole · #3 21st February 2008, 07:54 AM

I've not attempted this, but it should be possible to install SSH (including the daemon) on Windows via cygwin. It looks a little fiddly but should work.

Alternatively, you could learn a little Python and write a python program to run as a service on the Windows box and launch the commands you need following instructions received over xml-rpc (python includes an xml-rpc client/server pacakge making this fairly trivial).

krishna.hore · #4 23rd February 2008, 08:38 AM

Download freesshd server from

http://www.freesshd.com/freeSSHd.exe

Install it .. configure it...

Now you have a ssh daemon running on your windows machine,
You could connect to it from linux or another windows machine, and perform netstat, ipconfig or whatever you want...

I use it in my college for reserving a computer in the internet lab, :

krishna.hore · #5 23rd February 2008, 08:41 AM

I personally use putty on windows

http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/.../x86/putty.exe

and default ssh command on linux to connect to the server...

YbotSpawn · #6 23rd February 2008, 04:43 PM

I don't want to have to roll out a mass installation to all the windows workstations in my network. Adding any new policies to the Domain pisses off the powers that be. I'm trying cygwin but the rpm didn't install right... i think.... playing with it to get it to work... If not its off to the bookstore for a dummies guide to python

bryancole · #7 24th February 2008, 09:54 PM

This is an interesting topic (for me anyway). As to the python route...I guess you'd need something SSL-encrypted. Python doesn't come with SSL-support built-in. A recipe for a secure python xmlrpc server can be found at http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Coo.../Recipe/496786

I always find dealing with SSL certificates a PITA at the best of times and particularly-so on Windows, so I'd be inclined to use "Pyro", a simple remote object system for python. See http://pyro.sourceforge.net/ . Although this can also use SSL (still a PITA) it can authenticate connections using a neat challenge-response method which means the access-password cannot be sniffed. Thus, if you don't need full encrypted communication, but want to restrict who can connect to your "admin" interface, this is a substantial simplification. If the RPC-server reads it's password from a read-protected file, then changing passwords is as simple as editing the password-file.

For this problem, writing the RPC-server is only part of the solution. To make this easy to deploy on a load of windows hosts you can build you python script into a stand-alone .exe package using "py2exe" (http://www.py2exe.org/index.cgi/Tutorial). This avoids the need to install python on all Windows boxes (although this can be handy...). Finally, it's well worth building this into a self-installing executable using Inno-Setup (http://www.jrsoftware.org/ ) or similar. You can added a script to the installer to do the steps necessary to add the RPC-server as a windows service. There are some instructions on this at
http://agiletesting.blogspot.com/200...s-windows.html

Overall, getting SSH running on windows will probably be less work, but definitely not as fun.

robert.forster · #8 26th February 2008, 09:40 PM

You could always try Dameware utilities...there are a few things that can be done for this as in registry editing, services, and few other things that is done from a single console. I personally dont need it for servers anymore since I only have one left...which it will go away soon too

But at one time I had all windows boxes and it was a nice tool for having one terminal and all the client and server boxes within the domain listed at your fingers to do as you please.